Deconstructing Indians, Reconstructing Patria Indigenous Education in Yucatan from the Porﬁriato to the Mexican Revolution

06_Eiss.qxd 3/1/04 3:45 PM Page 119 Deconstructing Indians, Reconstructing Patria Indigenous Education in Yucatan from the Porfiriato to the Mexican Revolution By Paul K. Eiss carnegie mellon university resumen Durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX, las atenciones de varios grupos reformistas yucatecos y mexicanos se fijaron en la educación indígena en Yucatán, situando a ese estado en la vanguardia de la educación indígena en México. Las propuestas de los hacendados yucatecos reformistas, y de los gobiernos constitucionalistas y socialistas del período revolucionario, evidenciaban marcadas diferencias teóricas y prácticas en questiones educativas, conforme a sus distintas políticas e ideologías. Pero a pesar de las diferencias, muchas de las propuestas para la educación de las poblaciones mayas de Yucatán se basaban en un racismo utópico, según el cual las poblaciones indígenas se consideraban como poblaciones degeneradas, primitivas, y atrasadas, o sea por heren- cia biológica, o por formación cultural o linguística. Sólo a través de un proceso educativo que “liberara” a los “indios” de su idioma, costumbres, y cultura, se podrían asimilar a la patria mexicana como ciudadanos leales y productivos. Los diversos reformistas, en proyectos llevados a la práctica, se proponían eradicar toda mani- festación de diferencia étnica, para inculcar en su lugar una conciencia de mexicanidad y de modernidad. Este proceso fue concebido—tanto por hacendados, reformistas, rev- olucionarios, y socialistas—en términos espirituales, como un proceso de redención. palabras claves: México, educación, indígena, raza, nación. keywords: Mexico, education, indigenous, race nation. From 1909 through the early 1920s Yucatan was the setting for a series of attempts to establish schools for indigenous children in pueblos and on haciendas through- out the state. A variety of groups, including hacendados, teachers, revolutionaries, The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9(1):119–150, copyright © 2004, American Anthropological Association Deconstructing Indians, Reconstructing Patria 119 06_Eiss.qxd 3/1/04 3:45 PM Page 120 and government officials in Mexico City and Yucatan, made education the center- piece of broader strategies for the governance of indigenous populations. These proposals, and the policies and schools eventually established, varied strikingly, tak- ing their inspiration from a wide range of educational theorists (Torres Quintero 1918b), and from models that ranged from vocational schools, to residential schools for African American and Native American children in the United States, to “Ratio- nalist”schools established by Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona. Some reformers proposed to establish indigenous education voluntarily at private initia- tive, while others sought to do so through governmental intervention and the man- date of law. The curricula proposed were remedial or vocational, religious, or anti-clerical, and moral, civic, or political in content. Instruction was to be aimed at turning children into disciplined workers and loyal citizens, at instilling hygiene or historical memory, at countering the spread of socialism or inspiring revolutionary fervor. Schools took diverse forms, ranging from those based on the haciendas, to an urban boarding school aimed at transforming Mayan children into teachers of their own communities. Despite such differences, however, the diverse proponents of indigenous education shared a broad set of assumptions—as utopian as they were racist—about education as a process based upon nation-making and racial improvement. Educational reformers from the Porfiriato through the Mexican Revolution (Knight 1990) referred to Yucatec Maya populations as “Indians” (indios), a pejorative term with connotations of ignorance, marginalization, and primitivism. Reformers often noted the descent of Indians from pre-Hispanic greatness to a condition of contem- porary racial “degeneracy.” While they differed on whether such degeneration was biological and inherited, or cultural and hence susceptible of remedy, educational reformers of various periods and strikingly different political affiliations shared a view of “Indians” as primitives whose ignorance, backwardness, laziness, and apa- thy blocked the progress of Mexico. Indian “regeneration” was thus taken to be the primary goal of education, one that would require the remedy of imputed deficits and the extirpation of presumably inferior cultural traits of the “Indian race”— from language, to customs and dress, to morality. For porfirians, hacendados, and revolutionaries alike rural schools were to be the advance front of a wider process of biological, cultural, and political assimilation through which indigenous populations, to borrow from Marisol de la Cadena’s study of racial politics in Peru, might be “de-Indianized” (de la Cadena 2000). Once “Indians” were liberated of their language, customs, and culture, they could be assimilated as loyal citizens of tomorrow’s Mexican Patria. Race was to be eradicated as a form of essential difference separating Indians from Mexicans, while sublimated as a unifying component of the nationalist ideology that projected the new Mexican patria as a united and homogeneous race. In that new “bronze” race 120 The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 06_Eiss.qxd 3/1/04 3:45 PM Page 121 the descendants of Spaniards and Indians would be joined, miraculously, as one. Like social reformers and revolutionaries elsewhere in Mexico (Vasconcelos 1920⁄1929) and in Latin America,Yucatecan educational reformers were ardent proponents of what Jeffrey Gould has called the “myth of mestizaje” (Gould 1998)— though not as an achieved reality or historical fact, but rather as the desired future of the Mexican patria. Liberal reformers and even anti-clerical revolutionaries conceived of the project of deconstructing Indians and reconstructing patria in almost religious terms, as analogous to a process of spiritual conquest or conversion. Hence, from the porfiriato through the revolution of Salvador Alvarado (1915–1918), indigenous education in Yucatan was imagined, organized and insti- tuted under the sign of redemption. Rural Education and the Liga de Acción Social Long before the onset of the Mexican Revolution, the education of rural indigenous populations was a concern of reformers and policymakers at the national level. The topic was raised in the context of the establishment of national primary education under the direction of Joaquín Barranda (1883–1901). Barranda argued that it would be impossible for Mexico to achieve the progress desired by ruling elites as long as a majority of the population remained illiterate, and outside the educational sys- tem. Drawing upon metaphors of spiritual conquest and civilization, he called on teachers to become “missionaries” and conceived of the establishment of rural schools as a means of educating “the backward, uncivilized indigenous tribes”(Bar- randa cited in Meneses 1983:342; Bazant 1993; Vaughan 1982). Barranda’s successor, Justo Sierra, became a more outspoken advocate of indigenous education. In the spirit of Spencer and Comte, Sierra viewed Mexican society as a hierarchically struc- tured organism that could evolve and progress to higher forms if only exposed to favorable social, cultural and political conditions. Despite economic “progress” under the regime of President Porfirio Díaz, Sierra considered Mexico a country divided by race and language, whose indigenous majority remained outside the cultural and political life of the nation and impeded its development (Meneses 1983; Vaughan 1982, 1997). For Sierra, a broad-based program of popular education was the only way for the state to “regenerate” Mexico, securing social and cultural unification, and economic and political progress. In a speech to the national congress, Sierra declared the need for the “dignification” and “uplift” of indigenous souls through schooling: Let us put our coat-of-arms on the forehead of the indigenous children. They are the strength of our Nation. They are the secret of the future. Let us raise up the suffer- Deconstructing Indians, Reconstructing Patria 121 06_Eiss.qxd 3/1/04 3:45 PM Page 122 ing, fallen race, the dead race, to a life of the spirit, and of civics! Let us infuse them with the vigor of the nation, so that they may stand with us, as the bulwark of our liberties and the foundation of our institutions.”(Sierra cited in Liga de Acción Social 1913: v-vi) Like Barranda, Sierra used religious, even messianic, metaphors to describe the process of rural education, which he envisioned as a process of “spiritual construc- tion.” Teachers would be “apostles” or “missionaries,” carrying out the “holy work” of Mexicanization, and the school was to be a “civic church” where the “religion of the patria” would be taught (Meneses 1983:504,565,621; Bazant 1993:29,36). In place of a previous emphasis on rote learning, the rural schools proposed by Sierra and others who worked with him (like Gregorio Torres Quintero, who years later would direct revolutionary period educational reforms in Yucatan), would place an emphasis on pedagogy that was both practical (focusing on agricultural and domes- tic work, to increase the productivity of rural laborers) and patriotic (focusing on Spanish competency and literacy, as well as the teaching of the national anthem, national history, etc.) (Vaughan 1982:31,85). Despite such proposals, Porfirio Diaz’s lack of interest in and support of the rural schools

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